Following Leon Kirchner's use of magnetic tape in his String Quartet No. 3 four years earlier, Time's Encomium was the first fully electronic piece to win the Prize. At 31 and eleven months, Wuornien (a Columbia graduate who was on the University's faculty at the time) became the youngest winner of the Music Prize, a record that endured until Caroline Shaw received the award in 2013.
The piece was arranged and recorded on the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center's RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer, an instrument popularized in art music circles by future Pulitzer winner Milton Babbitt. Until the mid-1970s, the Mark II was the only synthesizer capable of polyphony, or the ability to voice multiple notes simultaneously.
A Pulitzer finalist for his Microsymphony in 1994, Wuornien has yet to compose another purely electronic piece. He has also worked on musical settings of texts by fellow Pulitzer winners Annie Proulx and John Ashbery.
Listen to both parts of the composition here:
(Album cover courtesy of Nonesuch Records.)